Eternal Threads: Clever time travel between captivating thriller and daily talk

I didn’t even know what to expect in Eternal Threads beforehand, just: time travel, sci-fi technology and story focus, so I was able to play the indie game from Cosmonaut Studios with an open mind. The intro welcomes you musically with wonderful 80s nostalgia vibes that make you want to experience a nostalgic mystery.

Although my first impression was full of good ideas and created a loose mixture between relaxation and curiosity, the promising retro music at the beginning aroused almost more expectations in me than the first few hours of play held. Here comes my first impression of an original mixture of complex time thriller, voyeurism simulator and Arabella.

Back to the Future

Eternal Threads doesn’t hesitate and wastes little time for an intro. It is enough to know that you are playing a time agent who has to go back to an event and change it in order to save the present and the future. Those who are sensitive to flashlights should be warned though, as there’s a lot of flashing in the intro!

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Our workplace as a time agent: a multi-storey shared house in northern England. There, a fire has claimed 6 victims: baby-faced student Neil and his newly separated sister Linda, model medicine couple Ben and Jerry (“almost like ice cream, hahaha”), party mouse and femme fatale Raquel and debt-ridden main tenant Tom .

You have to completely rescue this group of flat shares in order to avoid a catastrophic future. So you go back to the fire disaster as an invisible voyeur and now you have to manipulate the past with many small changes so that everyone in the house survives.

You can’t just brutally intervene in the timeline with full hands and grab everything, because that leaves traces. The time ranger must not simply prevent the shared flat from burning down, rather he must proceed more discreetly and keep changing smaller decisions in the lives of the six people in order not to create a paradox.

So Eternal Threads is primarily a mixture of visual novel and puzzle, because you primarily follow numerous dialogues (in English with German subtitles) and then make decisions, which then leads to new events and scenes. In doing so, you intervene quite a bit in the private lives and in the decisions of the six young people and try to save them from dying by fire with a network of the right events.

Like a cheeky parody of young adults

While this premise is an exciting, creative idea, the gameplay would work much better if those six people in the house didn’t look like “typical young adults” were cast on a fake daily talk show.

The somewhat awkward attempts at communication between the young people seem a little as if someone had tried to portray young people in a flat share who had never seen, let alone spoken to, any. And that can be very entertaining and lovingly quirky in a trashy way if you don’t take it too seriously and don’t expect 100 percent believable characters.

However, the game requires you to spend a lot of time with these people and follow countless dialogues with them that can get a little cringe. It might have been better if you could identify with them. Also, if the six characters weren’t semi-believable student actors, you’d care more about them surviving. So far I’ve been rescuing her because the game requires it of me, rather than because I’m desperately attached to her life.

And yet, after playing it, I already suspect that there is more to Eternal Threads than I have discovered so far. The timeline is long, there are promising hints of time anomalies and who knows: maybe the involuntarily funny cliche students with their “funny” sayings and questionable decisions will grow on me more and more!

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Eternal Threads by Cosmonaut Studios and Secret Mode are out on Steam for PC. Playstation and Xbox versions will follow.